Blogs

Android has been gaining significant marketing momentum over the last 6 or so months. I religiously follow daily posts on www.fiercewireless.com and I'd say just about everyday there is a post about Android: a new model being announced, a carrier rumored to sell an Android based handset, an announcement from Google on the latest release, etc. Unfortunately, they marketing hype hasn't exactly translated into Android devices getting into the hands of real users. That fact is looking like it is going to quickly change.

We just published version 1.4 of Shazon Shopper. This is not a big release, but it takes care of a few things:

We're proud to announce that we relaunched Shazon today. If you have been following us, you know we removed Shazon from the Android Marketplace a little over a month ago when Amazon told us to stop sending people to their network through the use of their Affiliate/Advertising API.

The good news is that we've taken the opportunity to build a much better application based on our initial concept of making it easy to answer the question: "How much does this thing really cost?"

Update, July 15: We relaunched Shazon today!

Update, July 10: We haven't given up! We will have a new version posted by next Friday (July 17), and it will include some nice new features.

We released version 1.2 of "Shazon Shopper for Amazon" today.

The biggest change is that this version works with Android 1.5 with Cupcake. (And it still works with Android 1.1, of course.) T-Mobile had planned to update everyone "by the end of May", but they had to delay things a week. Now, T-Mobile plans to have everyone updated by "early June.".

When we decided to launch Shazon Shopper we decided to slowly roll it out, get some good initial users, and then start to market the application through all the various online Android communities and blogs.

Much to our surprise and delight, we are starting to get some "press" from our initial users.  There's a nice post on at G1 Market News and an even nicer followup post from one of our users!

We just released a small change to Shazon for Android. This is version 1.1, and it replaces the original version 1.0. Even though it has only been two days since we launched, we discovered some performance problems that we wanted to get fixed right away.

I am happy to say that we released Shazon today!

We uploaded "Shazon Shopper" to the Android Market just a few hours ago, and our server logs already show that a couple dozen people have tried it out. I doubt those people have bought anything yet. Most likely, they just downloaded and gave it a quick try. That's fine for now; I'm glad people have noticed it and think it is worth trying.

A couple people have left comments, and that's really helpful too. We will use those comments to help us decide how to improve Shazon.

Since we are about to release Shazon, I thought it would be good to write about one of the books I found helpful in creating it. I didn't start by reading the book The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development, but I wish I had.
 

The second commercial Android phone was released back in February by Vodafone. Expectations are that this new phone will be available real soon in the US. Based on price drops of the HTC G1, I expect that to be true.

The G2 (aka Magic), is a much sexier looking phone than the G1. It doesn't have a keyboard, but uses the latest Cupcake update to the Android operating system that allows for typing directly on the screen. Rumors are that the phone also has much better battery life than the G1.

Here's a nice picture of the Magic: